Another way to do a song...

What can you do with a song in an ESL class?

Error correction

Gap fill

Re-order the lines

Re-order the words (!)

Running dictation (with the text...correct while listening)

And one I learned from Margaret Horrigan of IH Manzoni

Take the first verse of the song you want to do with your students. For this example, let's use "These Boots Are Made For Walking" by Nancy Sinatra (because this is what MH used at the conference, to lead into her lesson about shoes). 

Count how many words there are in the first verse, and maintaining the punctuation, replace each word with a letter (in order---1,2,3,4,5,....). You can do this on the board, leaving space to replace the numbers with the words. Or you can use the technology available, and do it as a document, which you then project onto the board (or else, surely, you can do it somehow on an interactive white board, but as I have no experience with one, I'll leave that to the really techy people!) 

If you do it as a doc and project it, you have the words under the numbers, but in white on a white background, so they are invisible at first. As the students guess them, you can then change the colour of each correct word to the colour of the team which guessed the word....

Proceedure : Divide the class into two or three teams, and assign each team a colour (according to your whiteboard pens, of course!). If you are still working on a blackboard, you may have coloured chalk. If you have no coloured chalk, assign each team a shape - the Circle Team, the Oval Team and the Rectangle Team, for example. 

Explain that they must listen to the song, and then they can hazard a guess - one word, or two or three or four (etc) words TOGETHER (this is to show them the lexical chunks). If the words are correct, write them up on the team's colour (or put the team's shape around the word). They can listen again and again, while they build the verse up on the board. 

Once that is done (and you can help them with questions such as "What can come before a noun?"), you then go straight into the lesson. 

This technique can also be used with short reading passages (which you, the teacher, read to the class), which also lead into the theme of the lesson. 

I hope I've explained this clearly enough. If not (or even if), please leave a comment, and I will attempt to clarify!

feedback session

I gave a brief and rushed presentation on the conference today at our staff meeting. I was happy with how it went, but obviously needed a lot more time to fit in two days' worth of inspiration. So I've said I will report a little more on here...just not right now!

Diamante poetry

Diamante poetry was one of the techniques suggested by Jeremy Harmer in his presentation "The Marriage of True Minds:  poetry and music in language teaching", given at the Accademia Britannica International House 50th Anniversary Educational Conference, in Rome, Oct 22/23, 2010.
Here's my first attempt (written on train on way to second day of conference).

FIRST DAY

Student

eager, open

repeating, speaking, inventing,

textbook, dictionary, computer, whiteboard,

miming, eliciting, smiling,

prepared, delighted,

Teacher.

I know - it's never going to win a competition, but the creative spark was struck, and I felt great pride in my little poem. Now imagine your students producing something similar. They have to tap into their lexis to find words they can use. You can give them the theme (Men/women, cats/dogs, summer/winter, day/night....), put on some background music (if they want it - remember to ASK. And remember, don't turn of the music before it is finished, just because you think the students SHOULD be finished!). 

He talked about many other activities you can do with poems in class. If you want to know more, comment, and I'll report, but for now I will just mention Jeremy's favourite - "YOU".

The students think of someone they love, and write that person's name at the top of the page.

Then the teacher says "Write about that person as if they were 

... a month."                 "You are April, flowers blooming, sudden showers."

...a kind of weather."    "You are a sunny day, warmth spreading."

...a kind of food."         "You are a bowl of porridge, strength to get through the day"

and so on and so on! He says that the students engage with this kind of writing, and that poetry can also be used to vastly improve students' pronunciation. I'm excited to try some of his techniques.

Accademia Britannica International House 50th Anniversary Conference, Rome, 22-23 October, 2010

DAY TWO

What a GREAT day! I think I enjoyed it even more than yesterday. I'm looking back over the programme, and I think the presentation I enjoyed the most was "CLIL - Herstory", by Deborah Withworth and Jo Glaiser, both of   Accademia Britannica International House. As has long been noted, text books to tend to focus on HIS-tory, with only token females (Amelia Earhart? Marie Curie?) appearing now and again - and those tending to be white and European. The presentation began with an exercise for students - nine women from history, of different cultures and colours. I felt ashamed that I knew only two of them - but I wasn't alone. We were then given the names of the women, and the countries, and had to match them to the pictures. I recognised more at this stage. The women were Rosa Parks, Ci Xi, Pocahontas, Anita Garabaldi, Truganini, Miriam Makeba, Aung San Suu Kyi, Jacqueline du Pré and Hypatia. We then were given a list of what they were famous for, and had to match again. The task then focused in on Jacqueline du Pré, with a listening (audio/video) taken from youtube, with some questions for the first listening, then a braille-coded gap-fill type exercise, where we had to reconstruct the text (listening). A very clear lesson plan.
We were then shown how to do something similar with a reading text about Truganini.
This was such a valuable presentation as it reinforced what I'd learned while doing the CELTYL - when teaching our young learners (or anyone, really), it pays to be creative with materials, instead of relying on the text book.

Jeremy Harmer spoke again this morning (and autographed my copy of The Practice of English Language Teaching! I'm such an ELT groupie!). His presentation was based on a series of short videos he'd made using a flip-cam. At several different ELT conferences, he'd asked teachers to talk about a successful lesson they'd taught recently, and we used their responses to think about the beliefs we bring to our own teaching.

There were two presentations in praise of the IWB (interactive white board) again - I even got to try one out! Yes, I want one. As with any tool, they don't work by themselves. The teacher still needs to put in the time for preparation, perhaps even more time than before, at least at the beginning. It seems that they might take some getting used to. You have to think about where you stand, so you don't block the beam, and you have to write very neatly on the board. That being said...I STILL WANT ONE!

The after lunch speaker, Paul Roberts, from the Centre for English Language Teaching at the University of York, offered a theoretical presentation entitled "Fixed Standards and Language Flows" which raised questions about how the type of English we teach our students. He talked about problems he has had with groups of students from different cultural backgrounds trying to negotiate and make decisions in English. One culture's way of showing respect may be another's way of showing disrespect - so are we trying to teach a "culture" while we teach a language? He ended with  two tentative conclusions and a question...
"Fixed standards may only be slightly relevant."
"Native speakers are probably irrelevant."
"Where are the new teaching materials?"

And I will leave you to ponder those while I make my way to bed.

Accademia Britannica International House 50th Anniversary Conference, Rome, 22-23 October, 2010

MY IMPRESSIONS (to be expanded later...)
DAY ONE

Nothing beats an ESL conference for giving your teaching a lift, and the first day of the IH conference had me soaring. Although I must admit that gone are the days when I just absorb everything. I am now more attuned to the presenter who is really informing me, and more aware when the presenter is just trying to sell me the latest textbook or product.

In this post, I'm going to deal with the speakers who really taught me something, and  inspired me to be a better teacher. Therefore, I have to begin with Norman Cain who, with just a few comments to open the conference, reminded me what a truly gifted teacher he is. It was fascinating to learn that back in 1984, Norman got his CELTA (which was called something else back then) at the very school he now runs (IH, of course).

The first speaker of the day was the famous (in ESL circles) Jeremy Harmer, the author of The Practice of English Language Teaching, among many other titles. His presentation, entitled "The marriage of True minds: poetry and music in language teaching, began with an enthralling performance of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116. He then went on to explain that his talk had arisen from a show he'd created with a musician friend called Steve Bingham, called Touchable Dreams. As well as some ideas for helping our students learn to pronounce perfectly through poems (I will deal with specifics in a later post), he touched on the use of music (rather than just songs) in the classroom. An important point - as teachers, we should remember to ASK our students if they would like some background music while they do a task, instead of just playing it...and then turning it off when we think the activity should end, even if the music hasn't finished!

Margaret Horrigan was the next presenter to inspire. Her talk on Biodiverse Teaching was based on a lesson using shoes as the theme. I'd seen part of this during the CELTYL course, but that didn't detract at all. The main message was that as teachers, we should show respect for accents, cultures, races, and beliefs, and that our teaching (especially of children) can be a chance for us to gently open the minds and broaden the horizons of our students. I got to help Margaret on the stage, too, which was a thrill (yes, my nickname IS Herminone!).

Norman Cain then gave a presentation on CLIL - Culture, Traditions and Religion - going where many ESL teachers fear to tread! And, of course, showed us how it can be done, in the most engaging way! He videoed a taxi driver in Malaysia, talking about Thaipusam and the Batu Caves, and played it to his students. REAL English, unedited...and they loved it. There are just so many possibilities.

The after-lunch slot is never easy, but Hugh Dellar (author of the Outcomes series of ESL textbooks) made it look that way. He compared ELT with the British Royal Family, with vocabulary and pronunciation coming in as lowly ranked nobles in thrall to King Grammar. His talk ended with King Grammar is dead! Long live...?
...lexico-grammatical structures?
...grammaticalised lexis?
... curiosity and wonder in the ordinary!
...learning and teaching!
and an invitation to join him on facebook (which I did, naturally...)

My brain was about full by this stage, and I didn't manage to get very excited by the last presentation, which was an introduction to the web platform english360...that is, until the presenter, Valentina Dodge, began to show us what we could do with it. It looked like the future, manageable, right there on the screen. And you can try it for free www.english360.com - which I will do, after the conference ends, tomorrow.

As with any conference of this nature, there is a lot of information to process. Tomorrow, I will reflect on Day Two, and then in later posts, go into specific details, applicable to lesson planning.